The culture of sexual assault, rape, and general disrespect starts with us, males. Not only are the vast majority of rapists and general sexual pigs male they are also complicit in reproducing the social consent that makes such a culture accepted. In private, amongst men, it is generally accepted that locker room talk and shit will happen. At work, in school, etc, when males are together we talk crap.
And I am not saying there is necessarily anything wrong with joking around about sex and shit in a private setting with people who are cool with it. That is a part of life and everyone, including myself, participates in it. You would be a humorless weirdo if, at some point, you didn’t laugh at some off color humor, or some sex or fart joke. Come on, we all do it. Joking around with your buds and “locker room talk” isn’t in and of itself the problem. So scratch that off your list of justifications to disregard the fact that the actual reproduction of rape and sexual assault culture rests with men, because nobody is saying jokes are rape or anything. Dont even try that “PC culture” shit with me I’ll knock it down every damn time.
The actual argument, and the things that men who do not actually do the sexual assaulting dont want to talk about is that these assholes who do do it will in private brag about the shit. I don’t know if every male here has experienced this but fucking shit I sure have. When you are giving specific instances of yourself harrassing women, touching them without consent, and generally disrespecting the line has been crossed, and we normal men then have a responsibility to speak up or be guilty of making it okay for the pervy among us to do what they do. For me, an introvert and person who just generally hates making waves at all, it was always really, really hard to speak up about anything that made me uncomfortable, or do anything that would make someone be angry at me.
But in the past few years, lately especially, I have found it necessary to make it be known to these men that their behavior is not acceptable, not even amongst other males in private. I found my voice out of duty, and even though I was making waves I forced myself to speak up and say, no, not fucking okay. I have had varying degrees of success in the working world with direct confrontation. I have had entire groups of other males say “yeah! What the fuck dude creepy!” (this was the most recent one, it actually was really awesome and I knew the other dudes I work with were solid as hell) to just crickets while dude blows up on me and roasts me for being “PC” in front of everyone.
But direct confrontation isn’t the only way to ensure the existing culture of consent in groups of men to pervy behavior is stomped out.
I have been in my current position for about 2 years. Luckily, there is shit tons of room to move up and ever since I was lucky enough to land an entry level position at the place I work currently, I have been on an upward track. On may way up to my current position, I became a trainer in my area. OJT at my job is everything. Trainers are responsible for everything from operating procedure instruction, to documentation, to customer service and corporate culture. One of my goals as a trainer and reproducer of culture at my work was to ensure that culture between employees never exists in the first place. I make sure and note the importance of mutual respect in a team environment. Your teammates count on you to do your job properly, and do so quickly and accurately. Creating unnecessary friction only detracts from the overall goal. If you behave in such a way that deteriorates the team environment, there would be consequences and I made sure all of my trainees knew that.
Like I said, the guys at my work (and there are few, we are about 75% women, 25% men) are solid. The guy who was making comments got let go for some other reason, but he never said shit like that again cause we put an end to it. We have all agreed to do it again if it comes up. We are all married, my wife actually works where I work, and all of us believe in the team environment. We have a very tight knit workplace and would back our female colleagues up every time.
Our biggest problem with harrassment comes from customers. Due to the nature of our job, we are often up close and personal with our customers, being that this is a quasi-medical setting, and, on top of that, we work with the general public. We get all sorts of people. There are a good proportion of men just off the street who seem to think its alright to disrespect our female colleagues because they happen to touch them in the course of doing their job. Both informally, in the break room and shit, and formally as a trainer I always made it clear to female trainees that customer harrassment was absolutely not okay and that the moment you feel uncomfortable was the moment it went too far.
Some of my coworkers, in an effort not to make waves and generate complaints against them have taken to not saying anything even if they are creeped out by something a customer has said. I have personally made a concerted effort to raise awareness of our harrassment policy and ensure that those customer who do have a history of making lewd comments and even touching staff get routed to our management properly. I have made it a point to tell people that if we dont report, we are training our customers to think that that behavior is acceptable and that it is up to us as staff to ensure those people are talked to, and if need be, excluded from participation in our service. None of us deserve to be treated like that by anyone, customer or not. I know how it feels, it has happened to me as a man at my current place of work. And it was...strange, hurtful, confusing...enraging.
We can end this in our personal and working lives. I know that if I have children, I can help end this culture of consent among good men and stigmatize this shit like it should be. That process starts with the realization that it is up to us, as the males just trying to make a paycheck and go home, as the males who were raised right, to stand up and end it. It took me a while to get it, but once I admitted to myself that although I have never harrassed anyone, I have a responsibility just as much as any male to end the culture, I worked my ass off to start end it where I work. And I will continue to do so.
If I can do domething about this in my small, low paying position and in my truly non-extraordinary and low influence life, so can everyone.